Embodiment is really just being and living through all of you. Using your body and mind together. It’s a conscious gathering of our experiences, feelings, thoughts and sensations. It may seem simple but most of us are more aware and alerted to our thoughts and emotions than our body feeling sensations. They are both very different worlds, bringing information, insights and intuitions from different perspectives. One could be seen as more analytical and factual and the other intuitive and reflective. One comes from the brain's predictive thinking, the other from being present to ourselves. We really need both.

Most of us struggle with our emotions let alone regulate them. They are often a mystery, surprising, can color our perspective on things and even dictate our decisions. There are many ideas about where emotions come from but most agree it’s a mixture of brain, nervous system, past experiences and body feeling sensations.

Any traumatic experience will engage the nervous system to respond and manage our safety. If the nervous system is not given the time and safe environment to restore back to normal then we can get caught in over alert or shut down states, sometimes without even our awareness. As time passes we may become aware that we have become disconnected from ourselves.

Having been through trauma and come out the other side, not once but many times, I can say that it is possible to live fully after trauma. And not just fully but meaningful, because of the insight and self awareness you gain from your healing journey. And it’s not like you know the solution to everything. It’s that you trust yourself fully, in an embodied way. Not many have that. You still get triggered but you are able to use it like an alchemist, extracting meaning as pearls of wisdom for yourself and others. You still have moments of feeling lost but you use it like a yogi, endeavoring to be present when in the unknown. 

Trauma disconnects us from ourselves and the world.

What does this really mean? In the decades that I have witnessed and worked with survivors of trauma, the most difficult thing we all experience is disconnection. That feeling that we can’t quite connect into ourselves. We’re unsure of what we are feeling, untrusting of our decisions and we just don’t feel quite solid altogether. We try to meet life’s challenges with this disconnection in the background, managing the best we can. It’s never easy. We think we have healed a major issue we’ve been dealing with for years, only to find the next layer awaits us. It’s like peeling an onion, painful and often distressing. It never seems to end. Not only has our trauma robbed us from real happiness but we also seem to never get to the end or find the all-in-one cure.

Our nervous system is our gateway to sensing and interacting with the world and ourselves. It keeps us safe and helps maintain our body, brain and emotions. It is also a part of us that is sensitive to change, can become overloaded by stress and dysregulated by trauma. If we can listen to its needs, attune to what rebalances it and heal it with restorative practices, then we can return to feeling resilient once again.

I have experienced chronic health challenges for most of my adult life. I know what it’s like to be in pain and feel stuck there. There can be times when everything feels impossible but I wanted to write today to say that it is possible to develop a new relationship with your body. It may sound strange but actually being more connected to your body is the key here. It’s not the hypervigilance that pain sometimes forces on us but it’s about learning to understand the language of your own body and how to respond to that. 

What no one is talking about is the relationship between pain and the nervous system and how understanding this relationship can help you navigate your healing journey with a greater sense of control.

The most life changing experiences that I’ve had in my life have been when I've been in groups. One of my first experiences was in a drumming group, it was just the power of being together working through something. Sharing that kind of experience with others and having something that brought us together made it so comfortable for me to be myself. It wasn't about sharing something of myself but it was just being with others who felt similar.

Grief and love go together, and this is why grieving is extremely intimate, private and impossible to share, maybe only with those who love in the same way as us. We all love differently and so everyone grieves differently. The loss is experienced differently, and the grieving is expressed differently.

There are as many ways to grieve as there are people and there are many reasons we may grieve. Here are just some of the things that may cause grieving: death of a loved one, loss of a relationship, past trauma, pregnancy loss, loss of a dream, unresolved relationships, estrangement, broken family bonds, a life changing event, just to name some of the possibilities. As we grieve we may think that we are feeling too much or we may fear feeling our pain or we may feel numb or wonder about an inability to cry or wonder how long our grieving will take. We may feel absent from our lives and unsure how to do anything. Or we may be constantly thinking in a loop of painful thoughts. Grieving is a natural response to our losses but just because it is natural doesn’t mean it isn’t one of the hardest things we will ever do. Other people may not know how to be with us in our grieving or may even feel scared of approaching painful emotions. If there is some initial support, after a short time we may be encouraged to move on, carry on, and get back to work, or we may not have a choice but to get back to work and care for loved ones, even if we feel unable to.  Grieving may seem to take the totality of our being for a time, yet our society seems to have forgotten how to grieve. 

Firstly, we can’t ever really forget trauma, like grief, the loss is not forgotten. When we experience trauma or an adverse event, the way we feel, think and even down to the level of our physiology dramatically changes. The way we process, survive, and live with this trauma depends on our emotional structuring, our beliefs and values and our physiological propensity.